U.S.-China crisis looms
THE STRUGGLE OVER HONG KONG'S RETURN TO CHINA
By Sara Flounders
chinabulletin.com
Excerpt:
These so-called China experts attack "naïve idealists who shrink from imposing sanctions." They remind the reader of the stakes: "The U.S. has been in three major wars in Asia in the past half-century, always to prevent a single power from gaining ascendancy."
Most predictions for military confrontation with China focus on the U.S. government's continued military and political support for Taiwan. This support directly violates the 1972 Shanghai Accord that President Richard Nixon signed with the Peoples Republic of China recognizing one government of China.
In a bellicose reminder of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy, the Pentagon sent aircraft carriers into the Straits of Taiwan in the summer of 1996. However, the greatest propaganda barrage in the mass media will unfold around the issued of supposed support for "human rights" and "democracy" in the British colony of Hong Kong.
Stolen during Opium Wars
Hong Kong is a British enclave of 399 square miles. Britain stole it from China in three forced expropriations between 1842 and 1898, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars.
Hong Kong is at the mouth of the mighty Pearl River, the commercial center of southeast China. It consists of Hong Kong island, Kowloon island, the New Territories on the Chinese mainland ceded in 1898, and 235 offshore islands.
The Hong Kong enclave has many natural harbors. Victoria on Hong Kong island is considered one of the finest deep-water ports in the world. Hong Kong has the world's busiest container port, an international air hub and a stock market that ranks with New York, London, Tokyo and Frankfurt. British control of Hong Kong has been a colonial affront, an insult to Chinese sovereignty and self-determination, since the land was forcibly wrested from China.
The 6 million people of Hong Kong represent only one-half of 1 percent of the 1.2-billion population of China. Yet Hong Kong has historically been an important bastion in the imperialist drive to dominate all of Asia. Britain used Hong Kong as a battering ram to smash its way through the Chinese dynasty's trade restrictions. Using the protected deep-water port as a secure base for the Royal Navy, British gunboats prowled the Chinese coast, forcibly imposing the opium trade and gaining ever wider concessions.
Britain fought two wars to defend its "right to free trade" in China. They became known as the Opium Wars because they meant the right to flood China with cheap opium in exchange for silks, tea and fine handicrafts. Millions of Chinese people became addicted to opium. In 1839 China forbade the importing of opium and destroyed a large quantity of the drug confiscated from British merchants. Great Britain sent gunboats to blast Chinese coastal cities in defense of its grand principle of "free trade." China had no match for British gunboats and was forced to sign the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. The treaty guaranteed free British access to five major Chinese coastal cities. China ceded total control of Hong Kong island.
Hong Kong grew prosperous, in capitalist terms, as a banking center. It was a secure base of British capitalism. All the wealth of British imperialism in Asia moved through this city because British administrators totally controlled the whole political and economic structure. After the 1949 Chinese Revolution broke the imperialist powers' hold on mainland China, Hong Kong's importance grew. Thousands of corporations that extract profits from the low wages and super-exploitation of workers throughout Asia were registered in Hong Kong.
This was a way to take control away from the newly emerging anti-colonial nationalist governments from India to Malaysia, Thailand and Burma, where capitalist relations were not yet stabilized. Hong Kong was a safe vault in which to stash the imperialists' stolen wealth.
What democracy?
Today every article in the major corporate media is aimed at rewriting the history of Hong Kong. We are told that Britain and the United States are only concerned with preserving the recent "democratic elections" in Hong Kong, the glorious tradition of a "free press," the uncorrupted judiciary --all of which created a prosperous city-state. There are increasing calls for a free and autonomous Hong Kong and preserving of the "free flow of information." Western-sponsored human-rights organizations, church groups and hundreds of politicians wring their hands about preserving Hong Kong's "democratic traditions."
But these pleas for "democracy," trumpeted to the high heavens by the capitalist media, only serve to veil U.S. imperialism's plans to dismember China and attack Chinese sovereignty. Both the supposedly democratic Hong Kong legislature and the so-called Hong Kong Bill of Rights are frauds --hastily cobbled together the very year the colony is to return to China.
Hong Kong is a financial center for thousands of capitalist corporations based in Asia precisely because it is not, nor has it ever been, a democracy. Hong Kong is the purest form of the dictatorship of capital. It is a key center of commerce, finance and trade in Asia precisely because it was a direct colonial enclave.
Capitalist dictatorship
Never in 155 years of colonial administration did Hong Kong's residents ever have a vote. There were no general elections. The Legislative Council was filled by a combination of appointments and back-room decisions among associations representing banking and financial institutions, trading and shipping companies, ship building, textiles, and electronics industries. Each of these corporate associations was guaranteed seats in the legislature based on its relative economic strength. Some
organizations of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and architects could also send representatives to the Legislative Council.
Although the population of Hong Kong is 98 percent Chinese, the government has never been headed by an Asian person. The governor of the colony, appointed from Britain, has always been a white English nobleman. He has absolute power, with the legal right to veto anything the ineffective,
appointed Legislative Council decides. This anointed government has the right to censor any publication and to
impose Draconian emergency martial-law measures if threatened by any unfavorable movement. The Chinese Communist Party is outlawed.
1984 agreement
In December 1984 Britain and China signed an agreement that the stolen port of Hong Kong would revert back to China. However, it would become a special administrative region with considerable autonomy and its capitalist economic system would be unchanged for 50 years. This was expressed under the slogan "one country, two systems."
An attempt to continue to exert political control after the end of British colonial administration began in 1989. After the movement for bourgeois democracy in China was repressed in Tiananmen Square, the British governor, Sir Christopher Patten, began to create a carefully groomed political
party, the Democratic Party. It is a party of collaborators. Its politicians and financiers never opposed the British colonial dictatorship --yet they are now demanding
autonomy and recognition of recently staged elections.
Hong Kong has a small but very wealthy and powerful clique of families who have benefited from British colonial domination since the Opium Wars. To further protect these collaborators, Britain granted about 600,000 people --10 percent of the population-- dual British-Hong Kong citizenship. This gives them diplomatic protection as they foment hostile anti-government activities.
In 1996, Patten organized a so-called democratic election. Two-thirds of the seats were again filled by appointees from the old blocs of business associations, as in the past. Only 35 percent of registered voters participated in electing the 20 seats open to direct vote. It was no surprise that the newly created Democratic Party won. The Chinese government refused to recognize this British-created colonial legislature.
It has bypassed it and is establishing its own administration. This has created a howl of outrage in the United States and Britain. Bourgeois commentators also demand that the "free, fair and impartial judiciary" be preserved. Such an institution never existed. The reality is that major British and U.S. corporate investors ensured that
any dispute over property be decided not by people in Asia but by judges appointed in London. All issues decided in Hong Kong courts could always be appealed directly to the highest court --which was the Privy Court based in London.
So what "freedom" are Washington and Wall Street determined to defend in Hong Kong? The Heritage Foundation, an extremely right-wing capitalist think tank, ranks Hong Kong first on its annual 142-nation Index of Economic Freedom.
That's because Hong Kong is a model of unfettered capitalism.
Caged people
What does all this "economic freedom" mean for the workers of Hong Kong? Hong Kong lacks any health, safety or environmental standards. It does boast strong protection for capitalist property rights. Taxes on the wealthy and corporations are the lowest in the world, according to an Oct. 26, 1995, report in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Public-relations brochures and travel books brag that Hong Kong has the most Rolls Royce cars --600-- and the most millionaires in the world.
Hong Kong also has the greatest gulf between rich and poor in Asia. Capitalist economic freedom means no guaranteed pensions or social security, no Medicare-type program, no disability compensation or unemployment insurance plan.
Instead, there's only a dole from private charities that does not cover the cost of food, according to the same 1995 report in the Far Eastern Economic Review. For hundreds of thousands of poor workers, life just means working until you drop dead.
The low-paying textile and clothing industry employs most people. Next are electronics and toy assembly. Many thousands of skilled workers are employed by banking and financial institutions. The workers do not have the right to union representation of their choice. Housing is crowded and unsafe. Rents are the highest in the world. More than a million people live crowded in places with more than seven people per room. Over half a million are homeless or live as squatters in shacks on mountainsides, shores or highway underpasses.
Thousands even live in tiny wire cages five feet high and seven feet long. On July 14, 1996, the New York Times wrote about the "cage people" who live packed into steel-mesh boxes big enough for only a mattress. The cages are stacked three high, 25 to a room, in decaying tenements where everyone shares a single bathroom. Seventy percent of Hong Kong's approximately 10,000 "cage people" are elderly and barely able to pay $40 a month for rent.
Which class will rule?
The British imperialists stole this port from China in the first place. It is past time they give it back. What could be simpler? But the transfer of a small piece of real estate is exposing many international dimensions of the class struggle.
What is really at issue is who will decide China's destiny. Is China taking over Hong Kong, reasserting its sovereignty --or can imperialism, through Hong Kong, again take over China? A struggle is under way to ensure that the vast amounts of world capital that move through Hong Kong can continue unrestricted by any regulations from the Peoples Republic of China.
Capitalists want more
For the past 20 years, the Chinese government has pursued a policy of embracing the capitalist market, breaking up the great agricultural communes into individual plots and allowing increasing capitalist investments. This has proved to be a dangerous course. Within China today, there is a
small but growing capitalist class. Its profits give it more in common with imperialism than with the mass of the Chinese people.
However, China's government is still based on the 1949 Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party still holds the reins of power. To the imperialists, this is still the party that broke the hold of imperialist domination in China and began the socialist planned development of China.
Capitalist investments have made vast inroads in the socialist economy. Thousands of assembly plants for electronic products, toys and clothes have absorbed millions of workers from rural areas. But the goods they produce are overwhelmingly for export. The Chinese government has placed restraints so that cheap goods do not overwhelm state industries. State-owned industries still employ over two-thirds of the urban population.
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